Originally posted by Preston May:

By the time you as the judge get to the table AP has a card in his hand that can't be accounted for through game actions while the stack is described as NAP having priority and jace ability on the stack. We describe it this way because NAP hasn't passed priority back to allow that ability to resolve. Describing the situation this way makes resolving the issue much more straightforward as well. There was an action taken (Drawing a card) that was done illegally and caused AP to have one additional card in his hand than expected.

Do you Thoughtseize a player every time they untap and immediately draw a card? If not, what's the difference?

If the situation isn’t covered by the previous three paragraphs, the player
reveals his or her hand and the opponent selects a number of cards equal to
the excess. Those cards are shuffled into the random portion of the deck. *A
simple backup may be used if there have been additional parts of the
instruction performed since the illegal card draw, such as discarding or
returning card to the top of the library.* Once this remedy has been
applied, the player does not repeat the instruction (if any) that caused
extra cards to be drawn.

Why are we not performing a simple backup here?

Dominick Riesland, aka Rabbitball
Creator of the Cosmversal Grimoire
“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then
their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to
destroy.”
– Christopher Dawson

Originally posted by Toby Elliott:

Do you Thoughtseize a player every time they untap and immediately draw a card? If not, what's the difference?

The difference is that in every case where I've been called for a player skipping to his draw, the players have been playing at a similar pace all game. In those cases, that skipping straight to draw is a nonstandard shortcut that they've established through play. If a player had stopped in his upkeep every turn, but then suddenly went straight to his draw one turn, I probably would consider the thoughtseize fix (after investigating for cheating)

In a standard format there's no way to stop the draw from Jace from happening. It's pretty safe to assume you can tap it and draw. You don't want someone to be checking every time they activate an ability to make sure that an opponent doesn't have a response. If the NAP wants to interrupt the flow of the turn, it's their responsibility to do so.

No but casting k command to kill jace and make them discard before the loot
is a pretty common play, that is pottery timing sensitive. That argument is
pretty poor.

Something I noticed hasn't been discussed yet:

Originally posted by Paul Zelenski:

There was also some discussion that once Player N calls a judge they are obligated to perform the action they claimed they wanted to perform in response to the ability/trigger. I understand how it is awkward to issue a penalty and fix and then no longer have the player want to take the skipped action, but I don't see where policy ever allows us to compel a player to take an action they had not yet taken.

From MTR 4.2:

A player may not request priority and take no action with it. If a player decides he or she does not wish to do anything, the request is nullified and priority is returned to the player that originally had it.

So let's say Player A taps Jace, draws a card, Player B calls a judge. Player B says to you (you are the judge) that he would like to have priority to respond to Jace's ability, but Player A didn't give him priority to execute his response. You apply the Thoughtseize fix, Player B sees Player A's hand, and based on that information subsequently decides he does not want to execute his response after all, and now declares no responses. Is this or is this not a violation of MTR 4.2? What is the fix here?

(This question is half-serious half-rhetorical, in the sense of “here's something you may not have thought of”; however if you would like to answer it, go nuts).

Originally posted by Lyle Waldman:

Is this or is this not a violation of MTR 4.2?

My understanding of this section is that it's designed to prevent players from playing “gotcha” with priority. For example, it disallows: NAP: “after you draw, can I have priority in your main phase?” AP: “um, sure I guess?” NAP: “Okay, you passed to me in your main phase and now I pass. We're in your combat step now” AP: “Wait, I want to dash my Zurgo” NAP: “Too late!”

I don't think it's germane to this particular topic.

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

The difference is that in every case where I've been called for a player skipping to his draw, the players have been playing at a similar pace all game.

Tapping Jace and drawing a card is the natural default across multiple games. Does this mean that prior to the DEC change, you were issuing Game Losses for this? That's where it seems like the logic leads to.

Drawing a card off a legally played ability suddenly not being legal if the opponent can demonstrate a conceivable response seems problematic.

Originally posted by Toby Elliott:

Tapping Jace and drawing a card is the natural default across multiple games. Does this mean that prior to the DEC change, you were issuing Game Losses for this? That's where it seems like the logic leads to.

Drawing a card off a legally played ability suddenly not being legal if the opponent can demonstrate a conceivable response seems problematic.

Tapping Jace and drawing a card immediately, without acknowledgement from the opponent, is not a natural default that I've ever seen? Do people play that way?

Edited Eli Meyer (Dec. 8, 2015 04:31:44 PM)

Players rush through parts of the turn all the time. Sure there are some players are very good at communicating abilities and knowing their opponent can respond, but this is a minority.

I think we should be looking at this with the thought of “how do players play the game?” Infracting against what is the natural way that players play the game is problematic.

As before I highly dislike applying DEC here. I've given it a lot of thought, and my general answer to this is GRV, backup by putting a random card on top of their library. And then their opponent can respond.

This also reduces the chances that they thoughtseize, then decide not to respond, which I think is a much worse position for the game to be in.

Originally posted by Marc DeArmond:

In a standard format there's no way to stop the draw from Jace from happening. It's pretty safe to assume you can tap it and draw. You don't want someone to be checking every time they activate an ability to make sure that an opponent doesn't have a response. If the NAP wants to interrupt the flow of the turn, it's their responsibility to do so.

If my opponent has a way to interact with Jace and doesn't want him to flip then yes I'm confirming with him that the ability resolves on every activation. sometimes it's as simple as announcing the action and holding the card a little above the deck until they acknowledge. While stifle isn't in the format there are plenty of ways to interact with the ability, namely killing jace before he flips.

Eli Meyer
Tapping Jace and drawing a card immediately, without acknowledgement from the opponent, is not a natural default that I've ever seen? Do people play that way?

Basically this. If you look at when judges need to get involved it's mainly when players shortcut steps. Drawing immediately off of Jace, playing rhino and writing down life total changes, tapping a chunk of mana without looking at it, etc. are all shortcuts that in certain circumstances disrupt the game.

Toby Elliott
Tapping Jace and drawing a card is the natural default across multiple games. Does this mean that prior to the DEC change, you were issuing Game Losses for this? That's where it seems like the logic leads to.

Luckily the two were never around at the same time. A similar situation that I have seen and handed out a game loss for:
UW heroic is playing against a BW deck and losing because he's short on land. At the end of BW players turn he tries to cycle a defiant strike on his opponents creature. In almost all cases this resolves without anything more than a confused look and that's what the heroic player assumed would happen. This wasn't one of those cases. The BW player was smart enough to know his opponent was digging and had extra resources so he intended to kill his own creature. Both the draw and tapping mana for the kill spell happened at the same time. Because UW heroic player didn't wait to confirm the spells resolution he committed DEC and was awarded a game loss.

And again, since the remedy for DEC allows for a simple backup (see above),
why are we not doing that?

Originally posted by Dominick Riesland:

And again, since the remedy for DEC allows for a simple backup (see above),
why are we not doing that?

Much as I agree with your premise that we should be backing up here and not awarding game losses, I think you have misread that section of the IPG. What the IPG (seems to) means in this case, and since Toby is here he can correct me if I'm wrong, is that, in addition to using the Thoughtseize fix, if the player has applied any additional instructions resulting from the illegal card draw ability that can be backed up, they should.

For example, Player A activates Jace. He draws a card, discards, and flips Jace. The fix here (assuming we agree that this is DEC; for the purposes of this example let's say we do agree on that point) is to apply the Thoughseize fix, and then apply a simple backup to the other 2 actions: unflip Jace and return the discarded card to the owner's hand (presumably we do the backup first so that the opponent has the option of taking the discarded card with their Thoughtseize, but nevertheless).

Originally posted by Lyle Waldman:

Much as I agree with your premise that we should be backing up here and not awarding game losses, I think you have misread that section of the IPG. What the IPG (seems to) means in this case, and since Toby is here he can correct me if I'm wrong, is that, in addition to using the Thoughtseize fix, if the player has applied any additional instructions resulting from the illegal card draw ability that can be backed up, they should.

I think Toby's point is that /NOTHING/ about this is DEC.